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On Sunday, Carly threw me a non-surprise second baby shower. The difference between a first baby shower and a second baby shower is that with the first one, the goal is to collect as many free baby goods as is legal. So you invite every woman you’ve ever met (or the host invites every person they believe you’ve ever met), promise them cake and appetizers, and don’t let them in the door unless they bring a very large gift bag or a fully loaded gift card. The goal of the second is to spend a relaxing afternoon with a few close friends and family, enjoying the toddler-freedom, and absorbing as much of the peacefulness as possible because you know there won’t be many more days like this.

This was exactly what Carly provided. She invited my mom and sister, my Anonymous mother-in-law, and a few close friends collected from our weekly Mom’s Night Out excursions. We played a few shower games, but I specifically told her that I would divorce her as my best friend if they were the kind of games that either a) embarrassed me, or b) required us to examine melted chocolate bars arranged to look like poop in diapers. She (mostly) obliged. There was one instance where I had to draw “birth control pills” for my mother-in-law, in a baby-themed round of Pictionary.

We had delicious cheese and mayonnaise based food, followed by yummy cake and brownies.

I also got some presents! Lots of teeny tiny diapers, teeny tiny baby clothes, food for after the baby arrives and no one feels like cooking, a new digital baby monitor to replace our half-busted old monitor, a new stylish diaper bag to replace my very diaper bag-ish one, a baby sling, and I’m sure there’s more but I forget. Pregnancy brain. But everything I got was fabulous and very appreciated and I feel so lucky to have such generous people in my life.

With Eirinn, I started leaking fluid at 35 weeks. Picture a pin prick into a water balloon near the top (that’s a leak), as opposed to a burst water balloon (that’s water “breaking”). We waited for one week to see if I was still leaking and to ensure maximum lung development. Because I was leaking for that long, that meant that I had the sensation of slowly wetting my pants sporatically for the next seven days. Scary, most definitely, and also very uncomfortable in the pantal region.

My mom and my mom-in-law both had to quickly reschedule their showers for the same weekend. My mom’s on Saturday, m-i-l on Sunday. I was swollen like a sausage, had gained 42 lbs (keep in mind, I hadn’t even entered the last month), was nervous about a) impending labour and delivery and b) becoming a mother. Add onto this a weeks worth of pants-peeing and now all of this in front of 20 people, two days in a row. While I was elated and ecstatic to have two parties thrown in honour of me (well, the baby) and they were wonderful showers and I was totally spoiled, I was a little uncomfortable.

So, Saturday, Sunday showers. My week of waiting was up on Monday. We scheduled the induction for the next day. Talk about timing.

Needless to say all of this was in the back of my mind this Sunday, making for some nerve-racking deja vu. You know, except for the peeing of the pants and the sausage feet and the feeling of impending doom.